Luigi
Fontanella, born in Salerno, Italy, in 1943, studied at the University
of Rome and at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in Romance Languages
and Literatures. He has served as a Fulbright Fellow (Princeton
University, 1976-1978), and has taught at Columbia, Princeton,
and Wellesley. He is currently professor of Italian at the State
University of New York, Stony Brook. Founder and President of
the Italian Poetry Society of America, Fontanella is the editor
of Gradiva, [P.O. Box 831, Stony Brook, NY 11790] an international
journal of Italian poetry. He has published ten books of poetry,
two books of fiction, and six books of criticism. His forthcoming
book of poetry is Angels of Youth, translated from the
Italian by Carol Lettieri and Irene Marchegiani Jones (Riverside:
Xenos Books, 2000).

"Fontanella's
poetic language has a quality of disenchanted transparency, always
containing a sort of suspended bitterness toward the elusive signs
of our existence, signs that question themselves, that show themselves
lovingly and visibly, but that, at the same time, slip away. I
find this to be a particularly seductive element of his poetry."--GIULIO
FERRONI

"Luigi
Fontanella is the single poet who has made in the last two decades
the most sustained contribution to the organization and diffusion
of Italian poetry in the United States. His poetic battle speaks
directly to the concern of all of us who write Italian poetry
in the New World."--PAOLO VALESIO

Luigi
Fontanella appeared at Poets House in New York City on November
2nd as distinguished commissioned translator of the winner
of the 2000 Bordighera Poetry Prize, Luisa Rossina Villani.
Here the translator is pictured with the winning poet at
a bilingual reading of her work from Running Away from
Russia (Bordighera).

"In these times of fashionable pessimism and
of a cynical refusal to sing the basic themes of lived life -
the love of origins, of parents, of companions and children; the
pain of lost youth, of distance, of unreachable dreams - Fontanella
dares to remain true to the sources and goals of his poetic making.
He is a deracinated Italian, and he writes of the betweenness
of his existence, often with recourse to the theme of travel,
of leavetaking and returning. He is a son who now recognizes himself
in his father, being himself a father. He is a child again because
of his little daughter whose innocence reminds him "qual
era" that boy now gone forever."--REBECCA
J. WEST

THE
TRANSPARENT LIFE

The
city opens its streets,

bicycles
pass without riders,

a
woman's face appears

in
the window and vanishes,

shopwindows
offer lusts

for
every season,

turning
of lives:

a
slim graceful couple dances

in
the deserted square,

the
running of man's race,

in
the forest foliage stirs

against
the light,

footprints
on leaves

and
tracks of hardened mud,

autumn
avenue

royal
carriage

rain
of dew

and
paper:

the
transparent life.

TO
A GIRL IN A SPEEDWASH

Still
before me with eyes and hands through so many days circles

closed
cycles air heat voices movements crunch crunch in the mouth

of
a little black boy one after another

there's
nothing sadder that these laundries on the edge of town

coin-operated
ones with no counterwoman to chat with about the weather